Failure to adhere to a prescribed medication dosage regimen is a dangerous and ubiquitous problem. Missing a prescribed dosage of certain medications, such as blood-pressure medicine, may result in significant harm and even death. Accidental overdose of prescription medication is likely to cause negative effects that are more dangerous than missing a prescribed dosage.
According to the National Council on Patient Information, up to 60% of all prescribed medication is taken incorrectly. Physicians themselves take only 75% of prescribed pills correctly. Non-compliance costs more than $300 billion a year in the USA, accounts for 13% of all hospital admissions, and causes 300,000 deaths.
One difficult aspect of adhering to a prescribed medication regimen for many patients is not remembering to take medication, but rather trying to decipher whether or not one has already taken a particular dose. The repetitive nature of consuming medication on a daily basis can lead to confusion, in patients self-administering the medicine, with regard to whether or not the last dose or one of a number of doses that were scheduled for administration have, in fact, been taken.
Many different medicine-administration regimes and dispensers have been proposed and developed in order to assist patients in self-administration of prescription medicines. However, the fact that, according to current statistics, non-compliance with administration schedules continues to be a serious problem and represents a significant financial burden to patients and to society indicates that the many proposed and currently-available regimes and dispensers have not effectively addressed problems associated with self-administration of medicines by medicine consumers.